LOGAN, Utah — There is big news on the small satellite front. From super-secret agencies and the U.S. military to academia and private firms, as well as world space agencies and NASA, ultra-small satellites are the big thing.

In sizing up "smallsats," there are a range of classifications in the less-than-500-kilogram department, be they minisatellites, microsatellites, nanosatellites, picosatellites, palm-size CubeSats, even the diminutive Femto satellite, weighing in at less than 100 grams.

Cornell University has begun to delve into a postage stamp-size "satellite on a chip " design, called Sprite, envisioning a swarm of these tiny probes exploring planetary atmospheres for organic compounds.

Call them a powerful force in the universe. Smallsats have already shown their ability to monitor disasters, study Earth’s environment and support agriculture, cartography and earth science missions.

Passed the tipping point
Smallsats are part of the solution — when they used to be a distraction, said Matt Bille, an associate with Booz Allen Hamilton in Colorado Springs, Colo.

So, what does this foretell? "The knowledge of how to make and use smallsats has passed the tipping point," Bille told SPACE.com. "It exists worldwide and has fostered a global generation of satellite builders and engineers. It used to be only a few organizations could build a satellite. Now, a smart teenager with a CubeSat kit and a soldering iron is a space agency. We’ve only begun to grasp the implications of that."

Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: "Astronaut Abby" is at the controls of a social-media machine that is launching the 15-year-old from Minnesota to Kazakhstan this month for the liftoff of the International Space Station's next crew.

"What this means for the future is that use of smallsats and satellites in general will only increase. The proliferation of smallsat capabilities has unleashed the most powerful force in the universe — human creativity," Bille said.

That was the message from Bille, joined by about 1,100 participants who gathered here Aug. 8-11 at Utah State University. The meeting was used to reflect upon 25 years of smallsat progress and what’s ahead — a gathering of experts convened by Utah State University and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. [ 7 Aerospace Technologies On the Road ]

Low-cost high-tech
Looking back over thelast few decades and gazing forward was Siegfried Janson, a senior scientist at The Aerospace Corp. in Los Angeles.

Janson flagged the onslaught of advances in micro- and nanoelectronics, microelectromechanical (MEM) systems, solar cell technologies, global positioning systems, and the Internet itself. Toss in for good measure personal computers, he said, stuffed with multiple processors, graphic cards, pepped up with more and more memory.

All that low-cost high tech has allowed small teams to blueprint, build and fly progressively smaller satellites with ever-increasing capacity, Janson told the audience.

Janson anticipates that there will be a wider diversity of missions by highly capable small satellites, like formation flying to create large but virtual antenna sizes to make possible enhanced imaging from space.

Collaboration
"Advancement of the technologies is no longer the primary issue," said Pat Patterson, chairman of the smallsat conference and director of the strategic and military space division at Utah State University’s Space Dynamics Laboratory. "It’s still the mission that matters. It has to give the customer some value," he told SPACE.com.

"It’s kind of all coming together," Patterson said, pointing to smallsat attitude- control devices, batteries and solar cells, new ways to beat the heat and cold of space, coupled with smaller, lower-costing launchers.

Collaboration is the key, said Doug Sinclair, owner of Sinclair Interplanetary in Toronto, Canada. He advised that universities building CubeSats need to focus on what they do best and rely on other groups to supply other resources.

"For instance, exchange a radio for a computer. Both groups end up with a CubeSat, but now they’ve got much better odds of succeeding," Sinclair said.

Common utility
As for what’s the future of smallsats, there will be growth, new missions, and new ways of working together, said Bille,expressing his own views and not speaking for Booz Allen Hamilton policy. "CubeSats are like the personal computer of this industry."

Hunsaker’s personal crystal ball predicts networked satellites with individual IP addresses controlled through the Internet and providing individualized positioning, communications, social and multimedia capability."Perhaps just like personal computing and cell phones that have common utility among individual consumers today, smallsats will also follow that trend," said colleague Tom Hunsaker, also an associate at Booz Allen Hamilton.

Bille concluded: “The age of microspacecraft is on solid ground now. There’s a definite trend toward putting small things together to do big accomplishments.”

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is a winner of this year's National Space Club Press Award and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for SPACE.com since 1999.

Southern stargazing

Stars, galaxies and nebulas dot the skies over the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile, in a picture released on Jan. 7. This image also shows three of the four movable units that feed light into the Very Large Telescope Interferometer, the world's most advanced optical instrument. Combining to form one larger telescope, they are greater than the sum of their parts: They reveal details that would otherwise be visible only through a telescope as large as the distance between them.
(Y. Beletsky / ESO)
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A balloon's view

Cameras captured the Grandville High School RoboDawgs' balloon floating through Earth's upper atmosphere during its ascent on Dec. 28, 2013. The Grandville RoboDawgs’ first winter balloon launch reached an estimated altitude of 130,000 feet, or about 25 miles, according to coaches Mike Evele and Doug Hepfer. It skyrocketed past the team’s previous 100,000-feet record set in June. The RoboDawgs started with just one robotics team in 1998, but they've grown to support more than 30 teams at public schools in Grandville, Mich.
(Kyle Moroney / AP)
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Spacemen at work

Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov, right, and Sergey Ryazanskiy perform maintenance on the International Space Station on Jan. 27. During the six-hour, eight-minute spacewalk, Kotov and Ryazanskiy completed the installation of a pair of high-fidelity cameras that experienced connectivity issues during a Dec. 27 spacewalk. The cosmonauts also retrieved scientific gear outside the station's Russian segment.
(NASA)
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Special delivery

The International Space Station's Canadian-built robotic arm moves toward Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Cygnus autonomous cargo craft as it approaches the station for a Jan. 12 delivery. The mountains below are the southwestern Alps.
(NASA)
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Accidental art

A piece of art? A time-lapse photo? A flickering light show? At first glance, this image looks nothing like the images we're used to seeing from the Hubble Space Telescope. But it's a genuine Hubble frame that was released on Jan. 27. Hubble's team suspects that the telescope's Fine Guidance System locked onto a bad guide star, potentially a double star or binary. This caused an error in the tracking system, resulting in a remarkable picture of brightly colored stellar streaks. The prominent red streaks are from stars in the globular cluster NGC 288.
(NASA / ESA)
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Supersonic test flight

A camera looking back over Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo's fuselage shows the rocket burn with a Mojave Desert vista in the background during a test flight of the rocket plane on Jan. 10. Cameras were mounted on the exterior of SpaceShipTwo as well as its carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, to monitor the rocket engine's performance. The test was aimed at setting the stage for honest-to-goodness flights into outer space later this year, and eventual commercial space tours.

Red lagoon

The VLT Survey Telescope at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile captured this richly detailed new image of the Lagoon Nebula, released on Jan. 22. This giant cloud of gas and dust is creating intensely bright young stars, and is home to young stellar clusters. This image is a tiny part of just one of 11 public surveys of the sky now in progress using ESO telescopes.
(ESO/VPHAS team)
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Fire on the mountain

This image provided by NASA shows a satellite view of smoke from the Colby Fire, taken by the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer aboard NASA's Terra spacecraft as it passed over Southern California on Jan. 16. The fire burned more than 1,863 acres and forced the evacuation of 3,700 people.
(NASA via AP)
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Where stars are born

An image captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Orion Nebula, an immense stellar nursery some 1,500 light-years away. This false-color infrared view, released on Jan. 15, spans about 40 light-years across the region. The brightest portion of the nebula is centered on Orion's young, massive, hot stars, known as the Trapezium Cluster. But Spitzer also can detect stars still in the process of formation, seen here in red hues.
(NASA / JPL-Caltech)
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A long, long time ago...

This long-exposure picture from the Hubble Space Telescope, released Jan. 8, is the deepest image ever made of any cluster of galaxies. The cluster known as Abell 2744 appears in the foreground. It contains several hundred galaxies as they looked 3.5 billion years ago. Abell 2744 acts as a gravitational lens to warp space, brightening and magnifying images of nearly 3,000 distant background galaxies. The more distant galaxies appear as they did more than 12 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang.
(NASA / NASA via AFP - Getty Images)
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Frosty halo

Sun dogs are bright spots that appear in the sky around the sun when light is refracted through ice crystals in the atmosphere. These sun dogs appeared on Jan. 5 amid brutally cold temperatures along Highway 83, north of Bismarck, N.D. The temperature was about 22 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, with a 50-below-zero wind chill.